Hello Linux: Virtual Environment in Working Directory
By Justin
This is the second part of a many part series. This post is the starter post for the whole series.
We use a virtual environment to ensure our project's dependencies will remain consistent from local to production and back.
Basic Requirements
Completion of Git Setup
- In the git setup post, we create a working directory on our production server. So yeah, definitely do that.
Live Server Details
- Ubuntu 18.04 is what we use here but not required.
- Other Linux Distro? Check how to install git, most/all other things are the same.
1. SSH into your server
Replace [email protected] with your user / ip
2. Install virtualenv Globally
Why virtualenv and not pipenv?
When you create a virtual environment with pipenv it's destination is unpredictable (certainly a flaw of pipenv) where using virtualenv the path is designated by us.
Now, when we do things manually you can use either. But with a setup script. Much like the one you see on this repo, virtualenv is much better suited for our needs.
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev -y
sudo python3 -m pip install virtualenv
3. Navigate to your Working Directory
From the git setup post, our working directory is in /var/www/myproject/
cd /var/www/myproject/
4. Initialize a Virtual Environment
virtualenv -p python3.6 .
So, as you might be able to tell, we can know exactly where this virtual environment path is. Make note of it because we'll 100% be using it later.
Here's what you should see:
$ cd /var/www/myproject/
$ ls
bin include lib
You'll want to keep note of /var/www/myproject/bin/ because you can do /var/www/myproject/bin/python -m pip install django which will install django to that directory's virtual environment.
5. Update your git post-receive hook.
Assuming you completed this post, you should do this:
cd /var/repo/myproject.git/hooks/
nano post-receive
In post-receive:
git --work-tree=/var/www/myproject/ --git-dir=/var/repo/myproject.git/ checkout -f
/var/www/myproject/bin/python -m pip install -r /var/www/myproject/src/requirements.txt
So /var/www/myproject/src/requirements.txt assumes that your project will have a src folder with a valid python requirements.txt file.
This will do a auto-install of all requirements after you run a push to this server.
6. Now we can test a real project to our server.
First, exit your server:
exit
Now, let's navigate to a place for our local project
Open terminal (or PowerShell for Windows)
cd ~/Dev/myproject
Remove previous local git repo (if there)
rm -rf .git
Clone working blank project
git clone https://github.com/codingforentrepreneurs/CFE-Blank-Project .
Remove that project's git repo (it's better for us to have a blank one)
rm -rf .git
Initial Git and add our Live Server's repo.
git init
git remote add live ssh://[email protected]/var/repo/myproject.git
Run a pull, if needed
git pull live master
Create and activate your local virtual environment
virtualenv -p python3.6 .
source bin/activate
Run local installs
(myproject) $ cd src
(myproject) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
(myproject) $ python manage.py runserver
Do you have errors? If so, please add a comment below on this post.
No errors? Do a commit and push...
git add --all
git commit -m "Added Django Project"
git push live master
Now you can go to your live server's working directory to ensure we actually have our Django code there.
SSH into your server
$ ssh [email protected]
Navigate to your working project directory and verify it has a src directory now (it might have other files too)
$ cd /var/www/myproject/
$ ls
bin lib include src
Wrap Up
We now have
- Git Setup for Push/Pulling Code From Local to Production
- Working Directory setup with a Virtual Environment (this post)
Now we need to